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A stranger’s collapses illustrates life’s fragility

Life hasn’t turned out as expected. As a result, I do not have a car with a driver and take the subway a lot.

Anyone in a similar predicament knows the mantras of The Better Way (sic). Any given rush hour is punctuated by delays due to signal problems, mechanical problems and my least favourite, those that happened when “the passenger assistance alarm has been activated.” This one is entirely unnecessary I’ve always thought, it’s just bad planning and selfishness — have a glass of orange juice and a piece of toast if you are prone to being sickly in crowded, moving, jarring carriages hurtling screaming through tunnels. So avoidable, so unnecessary, so not what I need on the way to a meeting.

One fine morning, as the crowded hurtling train entered the Bloor and Yonge station, a man standing near me, in the doorway, let out a howl like a dog with a point to make to the moon. My eyes rolled.

Just as the doors slid open to the crowd on the platform, the howling man keeled over on the floor and began curling into a fetal position, rigidly shaking in a seizure. Silent now, he was even more horrifying and the crowd on both the platform and the car took a step back. “Hit the passenger alarm” someone shouted and someone did, but I stood there and stared at the man now frothing a bit, still juddering stiffly, eyes shut.

t must have been mere seconds but no one seemed to say or do anything, all in a sort of paralysis, watching the strange display. Or maybe it was just me. But there did seem to be a wide circle of people around the fallen man on the filthy subway floor — that is, until a woman strode forward, in opposition to the slow backward movement of the crowd. “Excuse me, I have first aid training,” she said, entering the car and kneeling down beside the victim of something horrible. She rested a hand on his shoulder. “I’m Lindsay, can you hear me? You’re going to be ok. Can you hear me? I’m Lindsay,” and moved him on to his back. She repeated her name and her reassurance, clearly some crisis protocol she learned, but in such a calm and kind voice I wanted to be her best friend forever. Then she touched his neck. “There’s no pulse,” she said and then of course this was obvious — he was a man awash in grey — grey hair, grey coat, grey sweater under the coat, dreadfully grey face, dark grey to purple lips. He was not seizing anymore, he was utterly still as she began compressions — I only know they’re called that from a recent marathon of watching Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix — beat, beat, beat then check for pulse, beat, beat, beat check.

All this was riveting and happened more quickly than it takes to read about it, and as she worked lo and behold, a rescue team did appear just as the TTC always promises — a transit official who shooed everyone off the car, a police officer, a medic with equipment who stood by Lindsay as she did God’s work. She told him she’d had training and worked in an ICU — still calm, still working, as the man’s eyes fluttered open and there was bright blue in that landscape of pallid grey.

My friends jokingly refer to me as “a trained observer,” their mocking reference to my having been a newspaper reporter, most often mentioned when I’ve missed something right in front of me. Maybe it was this reporter instinct, but I had no impulse to do anything at all — not hit the alarm, not help the man, not flee. I did nothing but sit down on the seat facing the scene and watch it all play out, fascinated and disbelieving all at once. This man was dead, or dead until Lindsay beat his chest into life again — dead on the way to work. This day probably started the way they all did for him, he certainly wasn’t dressed for a special occasion, and yet this could have been his defining one.

As the poet W.H. Auden said in his poem Musee des Beaux Arts, perhaps they had it right, the old masters, when they correctly understood that extravagant events like sudden death happen when everyone else is just ambling along with their day. Your death is a profound moment only to you — to the rest, just another annoying delay on the way to the cubicle.

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Maybe this is why I sat there and watched — I didn’t want to just amble away and let this man die unnoticed and unnoted.

In fact I don’t know if he died or not — he was whisked away and so was I, and I don’t know if he ever realized he had an angel at his side in Lindsay. But he did have the effect of making at least me more aware of how sparing are the moments of life, how fragile.

Of late I’ve often recalled that phrase “you’re not getting any younger” which is sort of a lament, an admonishment to get on with it. We are none of us getting any younger. Better that, though, than as of today not getting any older, either.

Tracy Nesdoly’s column usually appears the first Saturday of each month.

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